“Fault-Tolerant Precision Time Protocol for Smart Grids”

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Radu Onica, Nuno Ferreira Neves, António Casimiro

in Proceedings of the 7th Simpósio de Informática (INFORUM), Covilhã, Portugal, Sept. 2015.

Abstract: The Precise Time Protocol defined in the IEEE 1588 standard is widely used to synchronize clocks, with a high degree of precision. The current needs of time synchronization in Smart Grids are satisfied with multiple GPS based clocks located around the network. This solution, however, is not cost efficient and if any of these GPS clocks is successfully attacked, a part of the network can be rendered unusable. This paper investigates a way of adding fault tolerance capabilities to the PTP protocol to address attacks aiming to interfere with the GPS based clock service. It is shown that the solution manages to detect anomalous clock behaviors and recover from them. Furthermore, the solution is able to deal with multiple GPS clock failures, as long as some correct time source is still available.